


Fortitude Stories

by caramelchameleon



Category: Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (RPG)
Genre: D&D AU, Fallen Angels, Fortitude rats, Hanahaki Disease, Nightmares, Youkai, aaron's serpents, actuals, hornbills du montreal, occasional Nobilis concepts, various nonbinary rinleys seizhis et cetera
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 00:09:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 6,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16712707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caramelchameleon/pseuds/caramelchameleon
Summary: Collection of miscellaneous short stories and descriptions of AUs, originally posted on tungle dot hellsite. Featuring the Glass-maker's Dragon cast, by which I mean 99% Leonardo de Montreal.





	1. being leonardo is suffering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by an anonymous ask: "Had another thought: Leonardo can’t stay awake any longer, gets third party not In The Know to promise to wake him in an hour. They see how exhausted he is and let him sleep- so he wakes after a full night of rest to a room that reeks of swamp water and is spotted with rot and mold, rolls over, puts his hands over his face, and very quietly swears."

Most of Rinley’s attention was on a nearby Hornbill du Montreal, apparently fascinated by the spectacle of its industrious, clumsy preening. This blatant disregard for his instructions was mostly annoying and a little concerning, but Leonardo had resigned himself to his current lack of options. His normally brilliant mind was running on fumes, thoughts coming sluggish and thick, and it was time - not to admit defeat, but to strategically retreat and regroup. A quick rest, and then he’d be back in top form! The incomparable Leonardo de Montreal would triumph!

The important part was ensuring no more than a  _quick_  rest, and for that purpose, Rinley Yatskaya was a markedly inferior substitute for the mechanical precision of Alvin RIMM. However, sometimes one was forced to work with inferior materials, and…

The train of thought escaped Leonardo as he raised one hand to stifle a yawn, glaring at Rinley and at the hornbill, which had turned to blink at them with three-eyed inquisitiveness. “No more than an hour. Sixty minutes. Do you understand?”

Rinley nodded, reaching out a finger toward the bird. “I know, I know. You wanna get back to work.”

“This is extremely important, Rinley. And don’t touch him. He’ll bite.”

“I’ve never seen them bite you.” The hornbill cocked its head, watching Rinley’s hand creep closer.

“That’s because they love me,” Leonardo said, with the certainty of a man who had spent several days carefully engineering in them this exact trait. “Will you  _listen_?”

“I’m listening! Vitally important project, you need a nap, wake you up in an hour, got it. Honest. Go to bed, Leo! All your stuff will still be here when you wake up.”

Rinley didn’t understand, but so few people did. Leonardo would have to… eugh… trust them. He left Rinley to their hornbill-pestering, shut the door of his bedroom behind him, and collapsed into bed without bothering to fumble out of his labcoat. There was oblivion, for a time.

The stink of the endless swamp rose around him - the stench of damp, rotting plants, of dead things - it clung to him, dragged at him insistently. There was nothing to hold to, no salvation. Filthy water swirled, extinguished fire, diluted blood, rose and threatened to engulf him completely. Worms were crawling, crawling, crawling beneath his scalp.

The dream again. Leonardo was dreaming, but there was no comfort in knowing he was dreaming. An ordinary nightmare was a moment of fear at best, a temporary and impotent thing that would dissolve harmlessly with the sunlight. This nightmare was quite, quite real, a tangible and hideous blasphemy, and he was indisputable master of such things while awake but, asleep, he could do nothing but struggle weakly against its grasp.

The worms scraped against the inside of his skull, and he could not free a hand from the sucking ooze to scratch at the maddening, unbearable sensation - not that it would help. Not that anything had ever helped. He beat his wings, frantic, but they were extinguished and waterlogged, barely able to move. He needed to wake. He needed sunlight, air - he struggled toward the edge of the dream, with the Headmaster’s mocking tones ringing in his ears, a distant echo of a memory.

Leonardo won awake at last and stared at the reassuringly mundane ceiling of his bedroom, breathed in a miasma of swamp and rot. The sheets tangled around his body were drenched, possibly with sweat, but if so it was lost in a greater wash of muddy water. He sat up gingerly, trying to ignore the uniquely awful taste lingering in his mouth and the itch under his shoulderblades. Why had he risked such a sleep? Hadn’t Rinley been by, pestering him about rest? Why hadn’t they woken him?

There was a note on his bedside table, still mostly legible through stains and mildew.

“Leo - I came in here to wake you, but you were REALLY out of it. I let you sleep cause it sure seems like you need it! I have to get back to the temple. Hope you had a good rest.” Rinley Yatskaya’s grandiose, looping signature was quite thoroughly muddled by water damage, but immediately recognizable nonetheless. 

Leonardo let his head fall back onto his waterlogged pillow and indulged in what his Mechanism of Original Sin dutifully informed him was a mildly immoral act (at least by some standards, and it was probably justifiable under these circumstances.)

“Fuck.”


	2. hold to your memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anonymous asked: "Um, Chuubo's everyone-remembers-but-nobody-knows-about-any-of-the-others au?"  
> ... which may not be precisely right for what follows, but that's the idea

“Miramie”- Melanie Malakh’s idea of an alias, as she bides her time and recovers her strength, under the mask of a different face - collates and compares the scraps of what the mundane people of Town know about their missing guardians, which isn’t much. As far as ordinary folks were concerned, the gods of dream and nightmare were there - perhaps not  _physically_ there, but a presence of guidance and protection - and then, around the time of the death of the sun, they had, in some abstract way, become inaccessible, disappeared.

The shrine families, who ought to have been in touch with the spiritual happenings of Town, weren’t much help; the Titov patriarch maintains, mordantly, that  _all_  their gods had died on that day, assassinated by the same enemy; the younger Kichis suggest, half-jokingly, that dream and nightmare had suffered a romantic falling-out, and they’d be back once they’d taken the time to sulk and apologize and make up. The Yatskayas laugh and look mysterious and smug and refuse to say what they think, except their youngest, who spins a more absurd “what-if” tale each time they’re asked. Malakh knows she’ll track the gods down eventually. They won’t stand in her way again.

Nobody suspects the young man cloaked in ordinariness so thick you could cut cubes of it for building material, but that absurd notion would never occur to you, when he’s so very ordinary. He doesn’t bother building an Engine, when he knows very well the source of his wishing power. He probably still gets into trouble with ice cream now and then.

Nobody suspects the young man who is blatantly so much more than ordinary, because he wills it so; their eyes slide off the blood and fire and feathers without seeing, and he passes beneath their notice. He did not attend the Bleak Academy, or cloak the world in forgetfulness to mask his deeds. 

They pass each other on the street and never know.

Chuubo is lonely, lacking his parent the world tree to coil around the branches of, lacking his friends around him, but with the full wisdom of his immortal age knows better than to wish for companionship. It would be a dangerous, unethical, and irresponsible thing, to potentially bring an Actual into this precarious little shell of reality. 

When Seizhi Schwan opens their eyes for the first time - comes into the joyful realization that they  _have_  eyes, that there’s a  _them_  to have eyes and to open them with - it’s in a neat and sterile laboratory, and, for a moment, they have to shield those brand-new eyes against a terrible and awe-inspiring radiance. They blink the spots away and stare at the person who, they assume, brought them here; that holy (? unholy ?) light is gone, but it’s unnerving how they can’t seem to focus on his (???) face. He’s not the person they somehow came into the world  _knowing,_  the emerald-green serpent who is a river and a wish and a dream and a thousand of thousands of feet long.

“Actual, I’ve brought you here and bound you here,” the stranger says, “to help me find an old friend.”


	3. eavesdropping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Creeping Zinnia: Do you listen into other people’s conversations, either idly or purposely? Has there been anything you learned from it? Have you gotten into trouble?

Dulcinea settled the glass’s open end against the door, with infinite caution. She didn’t dare give herself away with audible scraping against the wood, or worse, by dropping the glass entirely. **Her hands were so small. Clumsy. Wrong somehow.** She leaned in to press her ear against the cold, smooth glass, intent. If she could overhear, if she could learn what the plans were - there were always conspiracies, plans, the world against her, **where were her allies?** if she learned, if she could adapt, and counter them, she’d survive.

She looked up from her intense concentration into the face of Billy Sovereign, twisted into the triumphant, leering grin he wore when he’d found something he could get someone else in trouble for.

The orphanage director was not pleased. A lecture on eavesdropping, a supper denied, and Dulcinea spent the afternoon confined to her room, drawing plans and blueprints for remote listening devices. Their construction, their deployment, the principles of their transmission… **Her hands were awkward, graceless. She couldn’t draw right. She couldn’t THINK right.** She didn’t have the materials, anyway. Perhaps if she scrounged, salvaged - made substitutions -

She tore up the half-finished blueprints, and shoved her face into her pillow.


	4. planescape, I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> inhumanrobot asked: "I've got a relatable one that you can relate to: DND AUUUUU (any edition, give me those Advanced Dnd Planar AUs)"  
> which lead me to planescape, and more specifically planescape:torment (the primary source of my planescape exposure)

No gods are permitted to set foot, tentacle, or claw in Sigil, by the rigid laws of the Lady of Pain, enforced by her razored caress. Certainly, then, there are none here! Certainly the gentle and pacifist snake-god of a strange, short-lived, subversive yuan-ti cult would not be so bold to hide from the fangs of Merrshaulk and the rest of the cruel, savage yuan-ti pantheon in as dangerous a place as this. But then again, odder things have happened in the Planes.

Belief shapes the Planes, as every god has excellent cause to know, and when a lonely god-in-exile drops casual references to “ah, yes, my friend who accompanied me here” and “my good friend always says..” in thrice-a-dozen scattered, chance conversations with Sigil’s locals, he is soon possessed in truth of as good a friend as any he could wish for.

The prohibition is against gods,  _full_  gods, so the demigoddess child of a personified sun is safe when she flees the destruction of her mother’s court and stumbles into a portal, or at least safe from the shadow of the Lady. She is on her own when it comes to navigating mortal etiquette, mortal thugs, and the acute, aching pangs of homesickness.*

Angels who fall - who cling to the letter of the law and lack the compassion to temper it, their ideals worn down by gritty compromises with the mortal world - may be corrupted into erinyes, pleasure devils, a form of baatezu, retaining their feathered wings and turning their holy beauty to wicked ends. There’s no words yet, maybe, for an erinyes who’s become jaded to wickedness and cruelty. Is there somewhere further to fall from here? He’ll find out, he supposes, and takes refuge in Sigil in the meantime, out of immediate reach of the Blood War, where he can freely tinker with Mechanus-wrought clockwork and strange alchemy, answering to no one. 

The bitter erinyes wants nothing to do with the gods and demigoddesses and other flotsam from across the Planes that seems to keep winding up on his doorstep, he insists. He’s a law-abiding creature and can’t keep sheltering runaways. It’s less convincing every time.

* * *

 

*As the AU took shape this was amended: Same basic demigoddess setup but she died outright in the attack on her mother’s court. For whatever reason, though, her soul got fast-tracked through the petitioner process and became a lantern archon way ahead of schedule, retaining hazy memories of her life, which isn’t really supposed to happen.

Also, Attaris II might or might not have assumed the basic role of the Lady of Pain (proposed by morkaischosen); I've been mentally calling her "Our Lady of Blood" but haven't found an opportunity to bring her up.


	5. wish on a falling star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> morkaischosen asked: "AU ask meme: CMWGE Chuubo-went-to-the-Bleak-Academy AU?"

He almost turns away and renounces the Bleak, when he comes to its towering gates. He hates this cold, unhappy, sunless place, hated every inch of the long timeless, referentless, unreal journey he took to get here. But his best friend, his favorite person in the entire circumference of the Weirding Wall, is grief-mad from the loss of the Sun, and talking about ever stranger and darker avenues to power, and, maybe, maybe he can shoulder those burdens for his friend. Maybe if his intentions are right, he can fix this.

He’s only ever a middling student at best, with little stomach for the darker material, but his teachers are encouraging and kind, knowing what a prize he’ll be.

One day, out by himself, looking for a place to study - in this forbidding maze of architecture there are quiet places and secluded places a-plenty, but none that feel  _comfortable,_ yet - a coil of the Academy itself, some underlying strand of its structure, calls wordlessly to him. It’s not a real thing at all, with no identity, barely aware, but somehow it has a weak little wish of its own, and he adds his wishing to it, pulls and strengthens and shapes it into a person and companion, and from then on is that much less alone in the Academy’s corridors.

There’s no hope of measuring how much time it took - how can the passage of time be measured, without something so fundamental as a sun to traverse the sky? - but the lessons strike home, in the end. It’s like shedding his skin, a little; or maybe like his skin has stayed in place and something new has slipped underneath.

The oddity he’d peeled out of the Academy’s underpinnings and made to walk like a person can’t truly be subverted the same way he’s been, but it’s loyal to him, and that will be enough.

He can rewrite the false, hateful world to his needs, easily, but it’s prudent to be subtle and cautious; he takes the time, though, to wish the fallen angel forgetful, wishes him harmless and foolish and out of the way. It’s a kindness, he tells himself, to an old friend. It’s mercy.


	6. spirits and shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> retroactivebakeries asked: "Chuubo AU where Town never stopped being a yokai town and human colonization was waaaay lower"

It was always and ever blind chance that brought humans over the sea and through the Outside, and this happens less often here than the Town you may know. The ones who do stumble through the journey and manage to survive are tolerated, barely, as long as they are not too bold in their mining of iron and building of churches. The swan-people scorn them, the vampires prey upon them, and the Jotun wander down to crush their houses and churn their fields to mud every few generations, so slowly it seems almost absentminded. But humans are adaptable and stubborn; they survive.

The Yatskaya clan has not diluted itself by mingling with humans. It has only grown stranger and wilder with time, not less. They are in the lake and of the lake, riding the crests of Outside-borne storms and then weaving strange and fanciful nets to filter the unreal contaminants out of their home. Their youngest surfaces now and then to swim alongside the fisher-rat boats and swap stories with them; her eyes are a seal’s, dark from edge to edge.

There is a Jotun boy who is livelier and more curious than his fellows - although “livelier” than his fellow Jotun is relative. He’s prone to lying abed, or getting lost in the moment; he has little urgency in his life; but when he chooses, he can accomplish strange and wonderful things - like the Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine he built out of the half-broken wreckage of a farmhouse his fellows crushed in their last raid, some decades ago. It’s meticulously-carved wood, with no touch of metal to harm him in all the intricate gears. 

Natalie Coutourier, princess of the fang and frozen heart, is powerful enough to tolerate the touch of sunlight, but thrives best in Town’s perpetual twilight. She faced down Alexandar Celdinar over control of Town and won, rejected his plans for modernization; what they have is well enough. The Sun never yet walked here, to chase the spirits and shadows away; until today, when a thin, feeble ray of sunlight peeked over the horizon for a few moments, then withdrew. A child-sun, uncertain in her power. 

Nobody knows what to make of it. Nobody connects it to the orphan phoenix-spirit who stumbled into Town exhausted and weeping, and the haughty swan-prince who is her protector; nobody knows the meaning of the royal emblems on her clothes and nobody truly sees the bonfire-bright radiance of his bloody wings. They’d hoped nobody would think to follow them here, to this sunless and wild place, but her heritage has followed her, and the sun is struggling to rise; change is coming at last, for all the  _youkai_ have done to prevent it.


	7. heaven invades

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i would normally describe myself as indifferent to hanahaki but crossing the wires between hanahaki tropes and the nobilis conventions surrounding heaven + flowers resulted in This

He stares blearily at the handful of petals in his hand, as though he can change what they represent through reproachful gaze alone. The tickle at the back of his throat warns him it won’t be so easy, just before his next inhale turns into a hacking cough and another mouthful of bitter, fragile petals, sunlight-gold shading to arterial red, fall from his lips.

It should not have happened. It should not be happening. If the Weirding Wall were whole, if the Ash still stood, he would never have been this close to her, not in an immortal lifetime. Heaven had cast him out and locked the gates, him and every other who dared anything less than perfection, and the angels whose hearts were whole turned their eyes away from their outcast brethren. That was the way it had always been.

“Always” was not enough, and no Age could last forever; the war had ended, at a steep cost. There were too few of them, now, for the old structures to continue. When Jade Irinka arrived in one of the last feeble bastions of Creation, she had not ignored him.

Jade Irinka had never Fallen; she had never faltered. She had never doubted Heaven’s purpose. She was light and guidance and warmth, nobility, strength. She was beautiful, and beauty itself.

She does not need him. She is not alone, nor broken, nor wicked, to need refuge in the love of Hell. He has spent so long in Hell’s service, bogged down in the worst evils of the world, that he barely knows how to react to her, pure and virtuous as she is.

Heaven invades, and impossible flowers bloom where its touch is felt strongest -

He could feel them, blossoming through the hollow spaces in his chest. It would kill anything mortal, he imagines; they would choke and writhe and burst on it, on the sheer intensity of falling in love with a goddess. No such luck for him; the physical symptoms are a mild annoyance and nothing more, leaving him alive to wrestle with what they meant.

The flowers are clean and bright and healthy, with nothing of Hell in them, never a trace of rot. Was this the beginning of redemption, and did he dare accept that burden, if it was? What would it mean, to fall and rise again, and what would it mean when Heaven and Hell alike were nothing more than unraveled wisps and fading memories? He thought he had no desire to return, no longing for former glories, no stomach for high-handed angelic meddling. But Jade, Jade, Jade - could she ever love such a corrupt and twisted thing as he? Could she love him better if he renounced the song of Hell?

He coughs again; the petals are velvety against his tongue. A flick of one burning wing, and they are reduced to a smear of ash.


	8. rats' tales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> morkaischosen asked: please, if you would be so kind, furnish a hungry traveller with an Everyone Is Fortitude Rats AU

She takes to the changes more readily than her parents do, perhaps because she is younger, perhaps because she is exceptional. Even dreaming and lost among the docks and wharfs of drowned Russia, she had been strong and cunning; she faced down a grizzled old ship’s mouser once, and sent him yowling away with his ear in bloody ribbons. She hadn’t needed hands or swords or stories for that, but this is a new dock and she must learn the new rules. So she learns to walk again as her spine twists into a new shape, and to talk in an octave that humans can hear, and does her best to care for her parents, who are still four-legged and dreaming; and she listens to stories.

One of the first stories they tell her is this, because its descendants are still living today and she can meet them and see that it’s true: not long ago at all, there was a hero (though of course all rats are heroes). She was a leader and a guide, inspiring her fellows to courage and hope even in the bleakest of places; and one day she met cat-headed King Death by the shore of the Lake. Rather than go quietly with him, she leapt to battle. They battled for eleven days up and down the Lake shore, high tide and low tide, and they battled for ten nights, and the eleventh night they were exhausted, and slept, the one curled into the other. The hero dreamed, although what she dreamed is not a story for any rat to tell but her, and when she woke, King Death was gone, and she went home and began to build a nest.

Twenty-two days later she gave birth to King Death’s children. The oldest was coal-black, a shadow of a rat. He drank deeply of her milk and slipped away, vanishing into the night. The next seven were sickly and weak, and the second-born died that very night. The next night, her third kit refused to nurse, and gradually grew stiff and cold; the night after, her fourthborn perished. She could feel herself dwindling as well, with each of her children gone; she had come too close to Death after all. 

None knew what to do for her save one, a brash young scholar who had made a study of strange things, deep underground. He secluded himself with her and worked tirelessly for three days and three nights. He emerged streaked with his own blood, gaunt and exhausted, with the eighth child in his arms looking alert and healthy; she survived, but her siblings and her mother did not. She is a strange sort, touched by powers and Mysteries, and it seems she inherited a spark of her mother’s talent for leadership and guidance. She will be brilliant some day.

The rat who tells their newest Russian émigré the most stories and the wildest ones is actually a little younger than her, although of course as a Fortitude native they’ve been awake for longer. They confide in her that they aren’t a buck, aren’t really anything specific at all; they share the new name they’ve decided they want to go by, a human name, a hero from old human stories. “A  _Yatskaya,_ ” they tell her in a whisper, giggling, and then they have to explain the context before she understands why that’s a strange and scandalous thing. They’ve been spending time with the youngest member of the modern Yatskayas, apparently. She doesn’t really get it, but she agrees to help keep her friend’s secrets. It’s nice to  _have_  a friend she can talk to. Fortitude is strange, but it might be worth staying here, letting her mind continue to unfold like a flower.


	9. planescape, II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> once proposed, planescape AU continued to happen  
> i should note, because there was no organic way to work it into the narration, that here chuubo is [the kind of yuan-ti that has entire snakes for arms](http://kaaramel.tumblr.com/post/180097607527/ive-strayed-so-far-from-canons-light-and-for-what), Because That's Funny
> 
> to be safe, warning here for self-harm, although it's nonhuman and unconventional

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course, not every archon is perfect. Sometimes they stumble and fall from the path they’ve chosen; sometimes they choose to reject the ways of archons; and sometimes they are ejected from the celestial ranks by their brethren… Since archons are naturally forgiving creatures, it takes some incredible foolishness for an archon to fall completely from the grace of Mount Celestia, never to return.
> 
> – AD&D Monstrous Manual

The shop is in its usual state when Chuubo steps through the door: empty of customers and full of magical odds and ends. There’s more inventory than there is space to hold it, and all of it meticulously organized to some standard only the proprietor knows. Jasper is flitting and bobbing restless spirals around the crumbling stone lantern that she rests in to pretend she’s a more ordinary magical lamp in front of customers. Chuubo’s best friend is behind the reinforced sales counter, where their host usually sits, looking nervous and withdrawn.

“Everything okay?” Chuubo asks. Sometimes people mistake Seizhi for human, but Chuubo knows them better than that; knows them well enough to see they’re pale under the scatter of dark, scaly ‘freckles’ across their cheeks.

They shrug unhappily. “I dunno. Leonardo’s upstairs.”

“Did something happen?” Chuubo passes the neatly-wrapped parcel in his arms over the counter, tongues flicking out involuntarily after it at the scent of raw meat inside (three carnivores in one household meant a lot of trips to the butcher’s). 

Jasper bobs closer and volunteers, “He looked upset, coming in, but he didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to pry.”

“I can go talk to him,” Chuubo says, and Seizhi looks relieved, and perhaps a little guilty about being relieved.

“He listens to you more than us,” they say, and, “Good luck." 

There are three levels to the shop. The cramped front room is only a portion of the ground floor, with the rest given over to storage space for extra inventory, including the stranger and more valuable items Leonardo doesn’t allow ordinary customers to see. Upstairs is mostly dominated by a sort of workshop for alchemy, crafting, and ritual, now with two cots intruding haphazardly into the tangle of devices and components and wards. Leonardo’s own room is a cramped and spartan little attic, which Chuubo has only been permitted to see once or twice. With no other choice at the moment, he picks his way carefully through the workshop level, studiously careful where he places his long tail, and knocks. There’s no response, but no lock, either; after a long moment, he pushes the door open and steps through.

His first impression is of a gently shifting ball of fire, and then the sight resolves into Leonardo’s wings, a blaze of sunset colors that somehow catch the weak light of the barred windows so perfectly they’re nearly glowing. He’s curled up inside them somewhere, making soft little noises, almost birdlike, nothing a humanoid throat should produce. When Chuubo’s tongues flick out nervously, he tastes something metallic and sharp in the air.

"Leonardo..?” Chuubo ventures closer, a step, and then dashes forward to grab clumsily at the devil’s hands. Leonardo snarls and recoils, tugs easily out of his grip - Chuubo hadn’t wanted to bite down - but at least it’s stopped him from methodically pulling out his own feathers, for the moment. Scraps of orange and yellow and red are littered carelessly over the floorboards, like dying embers.

“Go away,” he chokes out, in a raspy contralto, and Chuubo is startled to realize he isn’t wearing any of his usual faces. Rather than the shorter jet-black hair he favors, pale-gold locks fall over features too smooth and perfect to be mortal, and he’s crying, gasping little chirps and trills of distress as tears flow down those lovely cheeks.

“You’re hurting yourself,” Chuubo says, plaintive, and coils his arms around Leonardo’s wrists more gently, holds them in place. “Please, did something happen?”

He takes a deep breath; flexes his hands, but doesn’t pull away. “A-archon,” he manages, and then dissolves back into wordless keening.

“Jasper?” Chuubo asks, anxiously. His tail curls gently around the shaking erinyes, not tightly, not pulling him closer, just supporting.

“No - ” frustrated, insistent, almost a shout, and then quieter - “In, in the market. A messenger. A…” He says a word in some lilting, melodic Celestial dialect, halting and uncertain from disuse. The sense of it arrives in Chuubo’s mind anyway, and the word he understands it as is  _trumpet._

“And… they said something to you?” Chuubo guesses, uncertain.

Leonardo leans in, unexpectedly, takes Chuubo into the circle of his wings, buries his face against the yuan-ti’s chest. His tears are almost unbearably hot. 

“ _The message was for me,_ ” he whispers, and not aloud; Chuubo’s heard that baatezu have a form of telepathy, but de Montreal has never used it around him. His audible voice is still letting out soft, warbling birdsong-sobs against Chuubo’s scales as he continues, “ _If I’m willing to apologize, seek penance and atonement -_ ” a long, high note, that trails off into more ordinary weeping - “ _The gates of Mount Celestia could open for me again. They’d take me back._ ”

Chuubo coils a little closer, holds him with arms and tail, lets him chirp and wail for a few moments longer. “Are you crying because… because you want to go? Or because you don’t want that?”

Leonardo makes a choked noise that might be laughter, if laughter had no humor behind it. “Y-you - didn’t - see,” he tries, aloud, and then resorts to telepathy again: “ _You didn’t see how she looked at me, at Sigil, at everything. You didn’t see how quickly she left. Couldn’t stand to be here, talking to me._ ”

He pushes Chuubo away again, tries to reach for a frayed patch on one wing, almost convulsively. Chuubo holds him firm, and sweeps up one of the discarded feathers from the floor with a dexterous flick of his tailtip; holds that out instead, insistently, until Leonardo takes it. It’s longer than his palm, rich golden-yellow shading to orange, and when Chuubo cautiously releases his hands, he runs his fingertips over the soft vanes with repetitive, mechanical focus. 

“ _I wanted to ask if there had been troubles with the lanterns,_ ” he continues, in a more even tone, emotion more tightly controlled. “ _If other petitioners had gone missing, or if Jasper was unique, or if Celestia knew she was missing at all. But she recited the message and was gone._ ”

“So she was in a hurry,” Chuubo says, gently. “Now you know they’ve forgiven you, you can go there and ask directly. You could escort Jasper home yourself!”

“ _Not without giving myself to them._ ” He scrubs the back of one hand across his face, harshly, mental voice full of bitterness. “ _Not without begging for absolution, accepting demotion, slotting back into their pretty little hierarchy, thanking the holy tomes for their mercy. I’d be down to a lantern again myself, probably, until they finally decide they can trust me again…_ ”

“Shh, shh.” Chuubo rocks back and forth, tries to soothe away the pain and agitation practically radiating off Leonardo’s words. “How do you know? It’s paradise, isn’t it? They’d want you to be happy. Maybe if you explained -”

“ _They can’t imagine I’d be happy any other way_ ,” he says, flat. Plucks at the feather in his hands, trying to pull it apart. “ _I know because I know Celestia. Everything has a place and a purpose and a reason. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. I don’t want it back._ ”

“You deserve it, though, you know. Even if you don’t think so.”

Leonardo lets the feather drop, rests his head against Chuubo’s shoulder. “ _I’ve done terrible things. I’ve been terrible to you._ ”

“You’ve been kind. In ways that count. And you’re already trying to make things up.” He nudges the brass amulet around Leonardo’s neck with the snout of one hand. 

“ _I don’t want to give up this body,_ ” Leonardo admits. Draws his wings tighter around himself and Chuubo. “ _Looking how I want to look. Vain. I’d be confined to the mountain. Selfish._ ” A long, shuddering breath, and then, aloud, “I’d be leaving you.”

Chuubo has no response for a long moment, just holds Leonardo close, tongues flicking to take in the dry, sulfuric, Baatorian smell of him, the acid of his tears.

“Not just you,” he continues. His voice is thick and clumsy but he persists. Maybe he’s afraid to give too much away. It’s harder to read his emotional tone now than it was when coming straight from his mind. “You, Seizhi, everyone I’ve met. All the places. All the planes. I’d be giving that up for some - some narrow little ideal of paradise. Where I  _know_  I wouldn’t be happy. I already  _tried_  that. I don’t want to bounce back and forth between the h-heavens and hells for eternity. I just want Sigil. I want -”

He squeezes his eyes shut and leans into Chuubo’s arms, in a boneless, exhausted slump.

“…Then you should have that.” Chuubo nuzzles against his forehead, light and brief. “Are the archons going to be upset if you turn them down?”

“Probably be glad,” Leonardo mumbles.

“Then stay. They don’t know what they’re losing.”

He sniffs, makes a show out of pointedly rolling his eyes, but the sarcasm loses a lot of sting when he’s still cuddled close, his wings warm and soft against Chuubo’s back. 

“I need to clean up,” he says, eventually, reluctantly. “Go back downstairs and tell Seizhi I’m not kicking you out, before they fret themself to pieces.”

“Aw, we know better by now.” Chuubo disentangles himself slowly, lets Leonardo sit up, pull away, resettle his wings behind his back. “You haven’t kicked us out yet, you’re never gonna.”


	10. roleswap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> faeline asked: "I don’t know if you’re still doing AUs, but what about more of that roleswap AU you [drew a little of](http://kaaramel.tumblr.com/post/177032533267/species-swap) a [while back,](http://kaaramel.tumblr.com/post/177042581017/i-guess-an-angelchuubo-can-be-a-seraph-since) where Chuubo’s a devil and de Montreal's a Serpent?"

Here is what the legends say: there was a town that suffered a great plague, which withered and ate away at all that it touched, and no one could find a cure, or stop its deadly spread. The plague was a long, many-legged insect, blind and twitching, its feelers thrashing mindlessly as it gorged itself on the dead, never satisfied. To the gates of this quarantined town came an ordinary man. None knew him, but all trusted him then, with his kind and friendly manner. He went to the plague and laid his hands on it, and its carapace cracked open. From the plague’s shell a red-haired child stepped out, bewildered by the weight of all it had wrought, unknowing. The townsfolk recovered from their illness but did not trust what the ordinary man had done; they drove the pair out and locked the town gates against them, and perhaps they wander still.

Here is another legend: there was a band of hunters who sought the glory of a great battle, and knew the denning-place of a mighty wyrm. They were not daunted by the long journey; they took up their weapons, and rode their horses hard. The wyrm was the length of a river, clad in all the brilliant, jeweled colors of a fire. The hunters drew their weapons and charged, but the wyrm turned away. Though they taunted and jeered, they could not provoke the creature into a fight. Though they stung it with arrows and whips, it never lashed out against them. They grew bold, and drove their hunting-knives into its leathery underbelly to cut out its heart, and the wyrm still did not retaliate. Disgusted, disappointed, the hunters rode away and left it there, hollow and empty.

Here is what happened on the day the Sun died: when a cinder fell away from the great funeral blaze of the sun, narrowly escaping the jaws of the eclipse, three great beings worked together to preserve it: a bird with six wings, who helped to slow her fall; a centipede with innumerable fractal legs, who caught her; and a beacon of fire who blazed so brightly that her enemies’ eyes were blinded to where she’d gone. It cost them less to make the effort together than it would have apart, but it did cost.

Here is what they say today: Leonardo is withdrawn and reserved, kind to animals, never struck out against those who bullied him as a child. A dedicated young naturalist, to work outside so diligently in all weathers. He hides how much he hates the dark, how it makes him lethargic and numb; he only feels alive when basking in sunlight and warmth. He believes, without knowing why, that if he chose, he could stretch and unfold his frail body into a gigantic snake of fire. He is afraid to know that he is burning, that only the cool waters of Big Lake will quench him for good.

Here is what they say: Chuubo is a lively child, always cheerful, full of easily-forgiven mischief. He’s one of those children with a face so average it’s almost impossible to describe, but everyone knows him on sight, and the best friend who follows him around like a shadow. The people of Fortitude have mostly given up trying to chastise him for pranks and petty shoplifting; he listens, but it’s like he doesn’t comprehend what makes those actions wrong. He hugs Seizhi tight with two arms and six soft wings, a body plan which has always struck everyone as so ordinary it’s not even worth commenting on.


	11. planescape, III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> inhumanrobot asked for "interaction with pets" + planescape AU, a topic which hadn't been strongly on my mind until then, but this is canon now, because figurines of wondrous power Good

It took a lot of concentration for Chuubo to keep his tail out of trouble when moving through the tight confines of Leonardo’s workshop; sometimes he didn’t quite manage. Today it was a chance jostle against a low table, which knocked over a tray of intricate little crystalline carvings. Leonardo had barely enough time for a wordless shout before the objects were cracking on the floor and - not breaking but changing, expanding from stylized representations of birds into full-sized, fully animate creatures. They burst into the air, circled the room in a temporary confusion of wingbeats, and settled, eventually, to perching on or near de Montreal. The figurine-birds were black-feathered and had not fully lost the glossy, reflective quality of their original material. They peered down their long, ungainly beaks with bright, inquisitive eyes - three each, and about half a dozen birds in total.

“What are these? What do they do?” Chuubo stepped toward one and held out a ‘hand,’ its tongue flicking curiously, but the bird ignored him quite thoroughly. The birds’ threefold gazes were all fixed attentively on the erinyes, fidgeting and cocking their heads quite realistically.

“You’ve managed to interrupt before I was able to program their function,” Leonardo informed him sourly, “so they don’t do much of anything, I suppose.” One bold specimen perched on his arm, and began inching even closer in little skips and hops.

“I think they like you!”

A noncommittal grunt was his only response, but Leonardo didn’t make any effort to dismiss the birds or shoo them away.


End file.
